Overland Travel is BORING. BotW Has the Answer. 

This tutorial is an absolute gem! The art of incorporating landmarks from surrounding hexes into area descriptions is such a revelation. I have little doubt it will dispel the humdrum generic nature of overland travel and will infuse a profound sense of discovery and progress into the party's exploration as they move from point A to B. This is a technique I'll definitely embrace going forward in my own campaign. Pure brilliance!

I once played in a game with a DM who really did exploration well. I was only at her table for a one-shot, but I thought she really nailed it as we travelled through the forest. As we walked west through dense forest (looking for an unknown enemy killing local fey, who turned out to be a young green dragon), we ran into problems stopping us from getting right to our destination. We ran upon a gorge, which we could either find a way to cross or spend a long time walking around. Closer to the dragon the undergrowth became so thick it was nearly impassable; we could hack our way through it at a slow pace or find a way around. I think a big part of making exploration interesting is encountering problems that make the journey more difficult. This makes travelling itself a problem that has to be solved and not just something you tell the DM you're doing and hand-wave away. And having a ranger in the party doesn't have to make life harder for the DM. On the contrary, you can describe to the player difficulties that only someone with expert knowledge could understand. The ranger would have insight into more subtle problems, allowing that character to shine.

Map Crow did a similar video a while ago ("Draw Your DnD World"). The basic gist is that you need points of interest drawn on your map, just little doodles will do, that will make the players go "huh, I wonder what's that about." It makes the game world and play feel so much more lively and mysterious, signaling that there's discoveries waiting for you everywhere!

This is super helpful for Tomb of Annihilation. I went ahead and revealed hexes with mountains and other visible objects, and immediately revealed the entirety of lakes when the reached the edge, since the jungle wouldn’t obscure the view across the flat water.

A standout moment for me in Tears of the Kingdom was wandering into a cave that happened to be along my path and encountering Gloom Hands for the first time. After panicking and finding a ledge out of reach of the Gllom Hands, I managed to kill them... only for a flipping mini boss to spawn in their place!

This is one of your best Baron. I'd been mulling this issue with hexes for a while and I think you nailed it. Now I'm inspired to write out a procedure for GMs for wilderness travel. Something like this. For every 6 mile hex: 1. Describe the general terrain they are in. 2. Describe transition from morning>noon>evening aligned with the 3 6-mile hexes per day travel rate. 3. Roll every X hexes to see if weather changes, describe the weather. 4. Check for and describe small landmarks in adjacent hexes 5. Check for and describe medium landmarks up to 3 hexes away. 6. Check for and describe large landmarks up to 20 hexes away. 7. Roll two different d6s to check for for X-in-6 chance of a random encounter or random location, using the d666 devil tables for interesting discoveries. (Populate tables with the story elements relevant to their area to allow for emergent story telling) 8. Play out the encounters/location exploration. 9. Ask the players whether they want to spend a day searching the hex (to find locations not otherwise obvious). 10. If time is evening, ask players if they want to camp. Deduct a unit of food and water, make an encounter check at night. Determine watch with party if/as desired. Example: (1) Long wild grass sings in the breeze as you travel through the plains. (2) The sun has passed it's zenith and casts all in gold and red as it approaches the horizon. (3) Thankfully the dark clouds seen this morning have dispersed. (4) To the north you can see a line of trees about 6 miles ahead of you. (5) To the south, you can just about make out the tips of the watchtowers back at your port hometown, now a good days travel away. Further to the north, the structure you believe to be an abandoned mages tower you first saw at noon grows larger, breaking through the canopy of the forest. (6) Far off to northwest is the great and ancient Working, an ancient megastructure carved from a lone mountain. To the east, the peaks of Glacier's Spine burn and refract in the sunlight. (7) As you travel, you come across a crashed prisoner wagon. As you approach, large talon-shaped gouges as thick as an arm are clear to see in the iron carriage. A paniced voice calls out from within, a prisoner pleading for release from their shackles before the wyvern returns to "finish his meal". (10) What do you do? Night approaches and you will need to make camp soon.

I want to specifically call out three products that are going to make prepping and running overland travel and hexcrawl exploration especially good: Uncharted Journeys, Worlds Without Number, and Sly Flourish's The Lazy DM's Companion or Workbook (both are excellent but even one of them will help a lot in randomly generating locations, encounters and adventures).

Stellar video! I don't know why I never thought of forecasting landmarks from multiple hexes away, and the random landmark generator was perfect. Thank you!

Slapping a wooden plank and a bunch of mechanical fans to my horse's ass was an epic way to get from Waterdeep to Luskan.

Fall out new vegas had a design feature where the developers made sure that anywhere your character was in the mojave, there needed to be 3 tall landmarks visible at all times to allow the players to orient themselves and navigate the area without needing to pull up a map. Such as giant dinosaurs, watchtowers, roller coasters, and casinos.

It's so strange. Timothy Cain (the original director of the Fallout series) posted a video on the game design significance of leaving visible landmarks for players to be drawn to, but somehow I did not connect the dots and think about implementing it into a TTRPG. Also I realized while listening that another way to facilitate organic exploration is by ever so slightly hiding that something could be in an "empty" hex, but still keep it just pronounced enough your players could pick up on it. For example amid your descriptions say "To the east are open plains, while to the north is just an expansive valley who's hills block your sight. Sir Regnar can't help but see it as an advantageous place for a battlefield." And if they look for it they could find an old battle field that wasn't quite picked clean.

Forbidden lands has the best mechanic I've used for this

I really like the table and the suggestions around at what distances a character should be able to see a landmark. Thanks for the video!

Using distance locations as landmarks and orientation is brilliant. Moving towards them leads to smaller ones that are closer. Excellent. "geographical white noise" indeed.

Another benefit of landmarks is that it lets your players come up with their own flowchart-like directional paths to specific locations. Just like in the Middle Ages when maps were rare, players can know that to get to the dungeon they need to pass the standing stones, turn east at the crumbled mage tower, and climb the foothills covered in the remnants of a forest fire.

I've been brainstorming a hexcrawl, this is perfect timing for me! Excellent advice.

The worst parts about your videos is that theyre so dense with info, i find myself having to rewatch with a notepad to make sure i dont miss anything.😂

double checking the visibility numbers: Actual formula is square root of height of observed object by 1.23 miles; which is both the distance someone on top of the object can see before the horizon, & how far away someone at ground level can see the object before it disappears over the horizon. For a 100ft lighthouse, this means it can be seen from water level from 12.3 miles away. How to adjust for players climbing a tree though? Add the formula for the observed object + the formula for the observer. So lookout in a 20 foot crows-nest can see the lighthouse from ~18 miles away (12.3 + (sqrt(20) x 1.23) = 12.3 + (4.5 x 1.23) = 12.3 + 5.5 = 17.8) Someone else mentioned being able to see 3 miles in any direction from the center of a flat hex, and the formula checks out for average height of 6 feet (sqrt(6) x 1.23 = 2.45 x 1.23 = 3.01). Which actually means the lighthouse can generally be observed from 15 miles away, unless you're a dirty halfling. The problem being of course, none of us want to calculate square roots at the table... so lets put it into a table instead :p ground |flat |10 high |25 high |50 high |100 high |500 high |1000 high 0 |3 |7 |9 |12 |15 |31 |42 10 |5 |9 |11 |14 |17 |32 |44 20 |6 |10 |12 |15 |19 |34 |45 30 |7 |11 |14 |16 |20 |35 |46 40 |8 |12 |14 |17 |21 |36 |47 50 |9 |13 |15 |18 |22 |37 |48 60 |10 |14 |16 |19 |22 |37 |49 70 |11 |15 |17 |19 |23 |38 |50 80 |11 |15 |18 |20 |24 |39 |50 90 |12 |16 |18 |21 |24 |40 |51 100 |13 |17 |19 |21 |25 |40 |52 6 foot high character, all numbers rounded. 25 feet high would be approx. average of a 2 story building, 1000 feet high is a small mountain. Obviously this could be simplified even more, which would of course make it easier to memorize & thus better

The Max Mad video game is also great as to making exploring fun and interesting. Even with nothing to work with but a barren desert they managed to add so many landmarks and points of interest. They also somehow made every region have a slightly different feel to it. (Probably more important in a sprawling video game where you can cover a lot of ground and get lost than in an RPG. But still something to think about in order to make different areas stand out and not feel monotonous.)

Ha, wasn’t expecting to see the BSD Daemon in a video about D&D hexcrawls. Very cool.

Very interesting video, thanks for posting it! I've written an article on this exact subject myself (on what we as TTRPG designers can learn about making exploration fun from Zelda: BOTW), so I totally agree.

I already include; points and personalities of interest, in my random encouter tables. But this video is fire; pure creative petroleum, for new and inexperienced Dungeon Masters. Love the content and I use it to brush up, on my own techniques. Happy Gaming and much love, to you and your dear ones Baron.😊

Ooh, this feeds in really nicely with the map I'm making. Basically each region has some massive thing in it, dead elemental titan, giant life tree, floating city over a lava lake with lava floating up like the opposite of a waterfall... you know, fantasy bullstuff. But if I build on that with more giant features, like make all the cities have a big tall thing (astonomy tower, castle, cathedral, ect) I'll be able to really get my players to appreciate the scale of the 6 states I'm working on. Awesome vid mate, incredibly helpful

One suggestion is that, if you can find a copy, the older 5e Lord of the Rings (I believe it's "The One Ring") had a really good set of optional rules that can be imported back into D&D that adds a whole lot more to travel with regard to things. A former DM (He was transferred out just over a year ago) used them in just about everything.

My random tables always have: plot enhancing encouter, helpful encouter, dangers, weather&hazards and daily thing to bring a real feel, now I'll include landmarks.

Yes! This is a great compliment to my favorite video of yours (making 2d6 random encounter table way better) and your second video, The Problem with RE. I use your d-devil tables everywhere now. At d6 they are bite-sized and easy to make for several types of hexes, can easily scale with +1, 2, etc. mods, and can easily incorporate regional mini bosses. Please keep making innovative content like this!

I love devil tables and highly recommend Maze Rats!

Landmarks. Simple yet elegant.

Good advice. I myself struggled a lot in the past to make travelling interesting to my players and landmarks (especially explorable ones) were the best solution I tested for the problem. I also like how you slightly suggest that minor landmarks within the hex the players are travelling can be somewhat fluid in terms of location, as to be affected by random tables, signifying that the players may have suffered a detour that brought them there.

Very astute observations. Thanks for bringing this to our attention!

Another fantastic video, Baron! With the point about terrain features becoming hidden beyond certain distances, that reminds me of another design choice they made when making Breath of the Wild: Triangles. The landscape is made up of triangles, so as to keep some points of interest hidden, only letting them become visible after the player moves... which in turns hides others. This kept things interesting while also preventing the players from becoming overwhelmed by POIs. You could also climb on top of these triangles, helping you spot far more landmarks and POIs than you would normally.

I'm planning to run a One Shot centered on travel in two weeks. This video is perfect for that! I'm going to try this tutorial and report how it went 🤭

I always enjoy your insights. I have been DM'ing for over 40 years and I still learn things. You inspire me, with ideas, which is probably the best compliment I can give. Thanks.

I've definitely utilized this idea in my games, but i took inspiration from Dark Souls series. The massive sky boxes point you to prominent locations, acting both as landmark and foreshadowing. In dark souls 3, there's a certain area where you can see most of the world, except for those places underground or obscured by terrain. And you can go to those places! Elden Ring bumped it up a notch by providing a jump button, increasing potential spots to explore. I took this principle with my megadungeon mountain and allowed the players to see everything on the overworld map that's above ground on one page. And if it is underground, the players can find an entrance above ground. This allows them to plan a route to where they want to go rather than just pick randomly. And of course, they find fun distractions along the way!

That chart is based.

The One Ring does a lot of this for both 1st and 2nd edition. Plenty of other games do too - Perilous Wilds for Dungeon World also springs to mind and I believe Forbidden Lands has lots of support for this too.

I'm not a big fan of doing a pub crawl around a map as it feels like busy work. Instead have them make a relevant traversal check. Success and they get to their destination. Maybe ask each player an interesting thing they notice (can reference this later for GM points) Failure and they stumble upon an encounter/quest hook/world building. I would suggest not rolling mid-game for these, rather roll before the session and flesh it out beforehand. Tie it to something else the players have already seen so that it feels connected to the larger world rather than something the RNG gods spat out.

The key takeaway (for me anyway) is something that should have been obvious to me. You don't need to BE in the hex to see certain landmarks...

Roughly speaking for Earth, and simplifying numbers. A person standing on, and observing a flat area can see the horizon about 3 miles ahead. So they could stand at the center of the hex, and see its borders if it was a plain plane (this was intentional, hah). Wish the distances were easier to remember! So it might be helpful to add a number on the landmark to be the viewing distance (in hexes) of a particular feature instead of trying to remember a chart. This number can then increase the player's viewing distance when on that landmark.

I love the speed of this video. Straight to the point, info-dump, done. Thanks very much!

Awesome video, this will help me with my hexmap.

I have been trying to tackle this issue for decades at this point. I prefer the slow, intentional journey to each major location. I do something similar to BotW with my yearly revisit of Strahd, where the castle always looms in the distance, regardless of location (assuming there is some open sky), you can see it. It's a creepy reminder of Strahd's ever present eye. It's also roughly the center of our Ravenloft, so it's a good point of reference for exploration.

Under 1 minute in and I feel completely seen Baron. I just got tears of the kingdom for Father’s Day and I’m running decent in Avernus (dungeon of the dead three specifically) with the 3 doors part lol. Do you have an arcane eye on me man?

Planet curvature makes viewing distances tricky. Assuming a perfect sphere the size of the Earth, with a completely uniform surface, and a viewing height of six feet (roughly eye level), the horizon is three miles away. So a person at the center of a hex would see the edge of that hex as the horizon. For the far edge of an adjacent hex to appear as the horizon, a person would have to be on a promontory 90 feet high (viewing height 96 feet). This makes problematic our beloved and otherwise useful six-mile-hex map scale. However, the thesis of this video is solid. Give the players interesting geographical features to make informed decisions about their travel. I love it. I wonder, though, if random tables of micro features are the way to go as such features typically aren’t seen at overland traveling distances. Perhaps it’s the lack of detail and visual cues on the average DM’s hex map that keeps hex crawls dull? Most “terrain” on a wilderness game map is just a flat featureless field of color noting its terrain type. I think a system of visual cues directly on the map may be better. But the problem of generating visual greater detail on a game map without adding mind-numbing procedurals eludes me. Harnworld’s solution is USGS style topographic maps noting all terrain features and elevation changes. But I doubt most DMs are willing to drill down to that level of detail or learn the necessary skills to create that kind of map.

Man I love yr videos so much! Always puts me in a creative mindset

I'm going to try Adventures in Middle Earth, so this tips for traveling and exploration come very handy, thank you

I loved these tips! Especially the wilderness landmark table idea. I don't use hexcrawl so the first part of the video eluded me, but I still learned something useful from the rest of it.

Mass Effect was released in 2007. Mass Effect 3 was released in 2012, which is why you were mistaken on the year.

I actually wish you made longer videos. I like to listen at work and I find this sort of content more engaging than listening to other people play the game. But I don't really find very much that isn't shorter than 20 minutes other than the Sly Flourish and Mastering Dungeons weekly videos. There are so many of these videos on this channel that I'd love to see expanded into something like a half hour or even a full hour long. I'm particularly thinking about the ones about applying geopolitics, but certainly not exclusively those. Mostly I just like what you contribute and would happily consume moar. And I'd happily do so even if it was less produced or edited.

Idea: The primary plot the characters jump into requires them to go from point A to point B. The terrain lends to a seemingly optimal path with a variety of surrounding hexes with visible plot hooks. Along the way you want the players to find and discover a dozen key items and pieces of information. Where ever your players end up going is where those things, or most of them, are found with a few planned dead ends along the way. Players make all the decisions, those decisions have consequences, and yet the DM can create and interesting story line without much danger of it being destroyed.

This is simply brilliant! Thank you!

Great video! You have Wilderness Survival on your shelf, the game that overland travel is based on. And you have The Dark of Hot Springs Island, one of the best hexcrawls ever made, and a great example of modern hexcrawls. I'd love to see a followup video where you trace the evolution of the hexcrawl through these, and other, publications, then tie-in to this video about evolving yet again.

Excellent observations.

It's a great video for adding perspective to distances, and making travel more interesting. Keep in mind that local terrain will change your view of landmarks. I'm guessing you've lived your whole life on a very flat part of earth. I can assure you a massive 200 foot tower that's 2 miles away can easily be obscured behind small hills, and that walking in heavy forest, it's possible to be a quarter mile from a 1000 foot tall cliff face, and have no way to see it. Even a sly Hobbit might need to climb to the treetops to even see where a significant mountain is, or even know what direction the sun is.

Been doing this for decades. Good to see that you like the idea too. Thank you, and keep making the excellent content.

Love it. As always 😊

i made a city whose entire economy was based around glass made from flail snails, the wall, roads and castle were all made out of this glass. the glare from all this glass could be seen from miles away

I personally prefer making portals available between the larger cities. Cuts down most of the journey and drains excess cash in the form of portal use fees.

Great stuff.... thank you! 🤓 👍

Theme park designers call them weenies. I think the term was coined by Walt Disney himself, iirc. Landmarks to draw attention and lead people to new places also act as references for navigation

Great tips!

Incredibly practical and useful, thank you!

Best hex fix I've come across is to make them 3 miles instead of 6. That way the players can "see" each of the hexes surrounding them

One of the best dnd videos ive seen in a while, keep going!!!

Thank you for your information video

This is a great idea! Thank you for putting this out. Where did you source your art?

This D666 table is sick thanks dude I’m totally gonna use that

Thanks!

Brilliant! Why didn't I think of this before?

I love this idea. And d666 tables are the best for interesting combinations that are just as fun for DMs as they are for the players to discover!

This this this! Old versions of D&D have a very high likelihood of you getting "lost" if you travel off the road. Why would you get lost in most circumstances? Unless you're in a dense forest or bad weather, you can see for miles around you based on elevation changes and landmarks. You're NOT going to get lost that easily. Even in the forest, if someone can scramble up a tall tree, they might see those landmarks. Is that enough to keep from getting lost? Not without a few other steps … but if your characters attempt to take these steps and would be even remotely successful at pulling it off (or can describe how they would pull it off), then no, the chance of getting lost is very low.

Just what I F***ing needed, combine this with your hexcrawl video and a D.M. will be on the right path, your 5 room dungeon/ story plot structure video set me up for success first time D.M.ing a session, and I think this and the hexcrawl video will do the same running my first hexcrawl arc/sessions

Awesome!

The only part that fell flat for me is putting landmarks 2-3 hexes away. Typically, most hexcrawls deal with 6 mile hexes. Human can usually only see 3 miles away. Now I can imagine a mountain being 12 miles away and being visible but a structure would have to be gigantic to be spotted from that distance

Good stuff here!

In summation, to make travel more interesting add interesting things to your empty world.

This is of your best videos

Totk's answer - yeet Link into the sky

Just buy the One Ring system and use its travel features, which handles all this and more.

My map scale is one day per hex scale, and I try to still do this.

@DungeonMasterpiece Very nice vid! Definitely going to use this in a West Marches campaign setting! Could you let us know who the creator of the pieces of location art is?

IM FELL font spotted. You Into the Odd one.

Wait, 6 mi hex are common? How did I not know this?

If there is full tables for the more environments I'd love to know where to find them for use as a DM

I cant see a 104-foot water tower from my house 1 mile away. Those distance numbers assume flat ground with no trees. Any treeline will obscure all landmarks in the distance except mountains that are quite close.

Someone make a bunch of this so I can run them. I'm too dumb to do it my self

I assume everyone here has seen it, but if you haven't, Game Maker's Tookit's video "How Nintendo Solved Zelda's Open-World Problem" goes into more detail on exactly how Nintendo thought about player navigation and decision-making.

It could be that I'm a hiker; I never had problems like this in my games. So as research, did you get those distances by using the 6-mile hex and visibility/vantage point calculations? If you are looking at the horizon from flat terrain or ground level, with plenty of light and an unobstructed view, the horizon is approximately 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) from you.

Mass Effect's travel was so bad that I forgot the game came out in 2012 and not 2006

Another absolute banger

Did game makers tool kit inspire this?! That video led me to very similar conclusions too!

Mass Effect was 2007, not 2012

Hot take: Horses are the most boringist method of travel in all open world games. If distances didnt take hours to traverse I would walk everywhere Like i did with The Witcher 3.

Who drew the illustration at 4:55?

Ahhh breath of the wild. I was wondering where you've been ;)

I'll be back in a few days when I have time.

Wow

You realize that this works only because the world is very open and incredibly small. There are no realistic forests in Hyrule, for example. Video games do not have the goal of being believable, but this is at the core of ttrpgs.

Is there an American developer that understands these issues?

Hi, did you create the illustrations with an IA? It's the same style and it's creating an immercive world because it's the same style.